As I already explained in the first Usability Terms article, consistency goes a long way in ensuring a pleasurable user experience in graphical user interfaces. While some user interfaces appear to be more graphically consistent than others, Windows has always appeared to be worse than most others - probably because it carries with it stuff that dates back to the 16bit era. IStartedSomething agrees with this, and started the Windows UI TaskForce.

Strange that Microsoft would need their customers to find remaining Win 3.1 Dialogs... it can't really be that no one at Microsoft found those, can it? Do Microsofts developers care so little for their products?

I can't believe they would be so incompetent not to even come to the most obvious of conclusions, like make the darn System Dialogs resizeable or remove HIG-raping Win 3.1 garbage... so they seemingly just don't care.

That was the overall Impression i had when trying Vista: "We don't care" - and neither do i anymore. I do not expect less than an complete and *horrible* failure of Windows 7 and i think it would be a good thing too: Microsofts monopoly doesn't look that much of a mountain anymore.

Yes, it has purely to do with incompetence and nothing to do with resources. In case you didn't know, Microsoft pays the people that work there. Even with all the money they have, they only have a finite amount of resources.

Do some of you people even think before you post or do you just start typing away whatever comes to your brain?

I don't think you know a thing about programming. The remaining Win3.1 dialogs are very scarce on functionality and even if they where as complex as the fixed size system dialogs... it is the functionality that is the vast majority of the work, making *all* those dialogs resizable can't be more than a day of work for an average capable programmer, even if they are done directly on Win32 API. You can't seriously tell me that you think they couldn't afford one day of one programmers valuable time to do that.

An Vista Ultimate Retail license costs more than an complete PC in Europe. I think for that price they could at least pretend that they would give a crap about quality.

You know, Apple can. I didn't switch because their stuff got so unresistible much better, it is because Microsofts products have become so unbearable much worse... i could have lived with the status quo, quality wise.

"It follows that if Microsoft sells goods that are aesthetically unappealing, or that don't work very well, it does not mean that they are (respectively) philistines or half-wits. It is because Microsoft's excellent management has figured out that they can make more money for their stockholders by releasing stuff with obvious, known imperfections than they can by making it beautiful or bug-free." - In the Beginning was the Command Line, Neal Stephenson